


That's My Girl

by FranklyNotReally



Category: Fifth Harmony (Band), Halsey (Musician)
Genre: All girl popstar families supporting each other, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Banter, Crime Fighting, Cynical!Halsey, Enemies to Lovers, F/F, Families of Choice, For some reason they are still a band that tours, Girls Kissing, I don't even know how to tag this, I don't think that's a genre but it should be, I mean pretty mild enemies really, Ill-defined superhero economics, Justice!Lauren, Lauren Jauregui/hotel rooms, hotel room fic, more like annoyance to lovers sort of, no real attempt to justify the internal coherence of this au, we've all been there, which doesn't happen often enough I feel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-11-17 06:23:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11269794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FranklyNotReally/pseuds/FranklyNotReally
Summary: What's a tour without a little vigilantism, a little Netflix, a lot of takeout, and a mysterious girl in your hotel room?





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Lauren has a night in ~ but trouble comes to her ~ not just in the form of a lot of food ~ we begin our adventures with hotel rooms

“Over my dead body,” Dinah said, with rancor, with finality, with a flick of her wrist that sent her hairbrush spinning out over the hotel bed, “Are you going out tonight.”

Lauren twisted her head awkwardly to make sure that Dinah got the full effect of the face she was making, albeit from the floor with her knees in the air.

“You _suck,”_ Lauren said flatly, but then spoiled it by laughing. “Help me, Normani.”

Normani snorted. “You got yourself busted up, you’ve got to hold down the fort. Them’s the rules.”

Lauren spread her hands wide and raised them, palms up, to the ceiling.  “When have those ever been the rules?”

“When you nearly fell off the stage in Isla Vista,” Dinah suggested, “Or when you bombed that interview in Australia by _falling asleep on the mic._ I think it was sometime around then, that we decided we needed rules. You’re overwhelmed, you’re tired, you gotta take a rest.”

Normani hadn’t turned around from the tiny hotel mirror where she was applying a new layer of eyeliner, but Lauren could just feel her nodding in agreement. Lauren tried, and failed, to get up off the floor.

“I’m fine,” Lauren said, thumping her head into the carpet. No pain, no gain: she levered her arms underneath her own shoulders with admirable flexibility and successfully pushed into a sitting position. Everything hurt, a lot. “I’m totally good to go.”

“Will you just fucking--” Dinah threw a pillow at her and it landed squarely underneath Lauren’s torso, of course, just in time for Lauren to fall back down onto it. Dinah had unerring aim, which was why she was the markswoman.

“Stay in for _one night,”_ Dinah said, checking innumerable zippers and tugging her hair into place under the mask. Normani was hustling equipment into the sleek, streamlined bags that they’d switched to ever since that incident with Ally and the telephone wires. Equipment wrangling was usually Lauren’s job and she chewed her lower lip, watching. _You don’t need any more lip,_ Mom would’ve said if she’d been there, but she wasn’t.

Lauren thumped her head again, but into the pillow this time, just for good measure.  “At least send me up some takeout?”

 

*

 

Lauren didn’t hate safe house. Lauren couldn’t truly hate any place where the main activity was Netflixing in pajamas while eating three different kinds of takeout (Dinah sent thai, Normani sent Italian, and Ally, bless her face, got a Cuban foodtruck to deliver). But Lauren hated not being out in the field with the girls, not knowing if they were ok. It’s not like they needed her, it’s not like they weren’t kickass and amazing in their own right, but one more pair of eyes was always gonna be one more pair of eyes.

 Lauren scrolled through _Continue Watching for TehHarmonLIEZERS,_ which displayed an unsatisfying mixture of cooking shows, old-timey murder mysteries solved by elderly aunties, and documentaries that made Lauren sleepy just looking at them. She picked at the thai, wrinkled her lip at the little spicy green peppers, and tossed them one by one onto Dinah’s pillow. Lauren migrated, with considerable drama and just a little cursing, to the little armchair that sat between the two queen beds. Then a girl crashed through the window.

The glass shattered, sprayed backwards into the room in an impressive cascade, something that probably wouldn’t have happened if Dinah had picked the modern hotel that Lauren had wanted instead of this old place with its old, non-safety glass.

The girl had fallen to her hands and knees on the carpet, rolled into a nice counterbalance, and rocked upright. She had a ridiculous white jumpsuit that reflected _all_ light, not what Lauren would’ve worn at night, and pieces of glass bounced down its shimmering surface. She had a wild green pixie cut and really great eyebrow makeup and, of course, a gun trained on her because Lauren was injured, not stupid.

“Don’t move,” Lauren hissed.

The girl made a _sure, no problem_ face, pressing her lips together in a twisted smile, and then she darted her eyes around the room and barked a short laugh.

“You’ve gotta be shitting me,” she said. Lauren immediately decided that this was an annoying voice, high and vocal fried and tired.  

Lauren had lunged out of the chair when the window broke, which she was probably going to regret, but right now she stepped a few feet closer. It wouldn’t actually make the gun more accurate, but it had a physical intimidation effect. The girl raised her hands carefully.

“Wrong room,” she said, “I promise. Did not mean to offend. I was out handling a job, got a little carried away coming home. I’ve clearly landed in the wrong operation. I think my safe house is probably two streets south.”

 Dinah was always saying that Lauren was too trusting. Big talk from a woman who’d once followed a known supervillain into a burning building because he told her there was a kid to save at the top. But they were in a new city, and there were a lot of local heroes around, and these streets all looked the same. Lauren lowered the gun.

 “Dude, you’re _bleeding_ ,” Lauren said, as the ripple of red washing through the girl’s white sleeve finally resolved into sense.

 “Oh, yeah, that _is_ blood,” the girl said, agreeably, but her bright, jagged-cornered eyes looked shifty. Lauren, who was faster than people expected, had already gotten the sleeve half-up because god dammit, this was still the safe house. But underneath her fingers the girl’s skin was knitting itself together like kinetic sand.

 “Fuck,” Lauren said.

 “I know,” the girl said. “It’s always so gross.”

 She shrugged the sleeve back down over the disorienting skin, which already looked smooth and shiny and not like it had been nearly destroyed just seconds ago. No wonder she threw herself face-first through windows, although if Lauren were the one sponsoring this girl, she’d be pissed at all the hotel bills. The girl looked up at Lauren through long, long eyelashes.

 “I’m Halsey,” she said. “New in town?”

 Lauren stepped back, shrugged. “We’re passing through,” she said carefully. Halsey nodded and scratched the side of her jaw. Her fingernails were painted black, or maybe a dark blue, and either way they didn’t go with the hair or the jumpsuit.

 “You’ve got powers,” Lauren said.

 “What tipped you off?” Halsey smirked.

 Lauren rolled her eyes. “I mean, we had no idea anybody here had _powers.”_

 Local heroes, sure; everybody was a local hero these days. But they’d put the city on the tour because they’d heard it was an unpowered place, that a group like them could really help. Maybe Halsey had heard the same rumors.

 “Ok, tourist, what’s your name?” Halsey asked, and her face was studiously casual, but Lauren had been doing this for a while, too; she could see her muscle tension building, knew the girl was about to jump right back out the window.

 “Lauren,” Lauren said, like an idiot, _too trusting._ Halsey grinned at her. She was already half-way to the window, backing out, still grinning like a maniac. This Halsey girl was nuts.

“Let me guess, angel like you, bet you can fly?”

Lauren thought about the soreness that spread from her shoulders down through her back, and back home, shattered cement and concrete like a snow angel made in a city street.

 “No,” Lauren said.

 “That’s a pity!” Halsey yelled. “Would’ve liked the company!”  

 She hit the ledge, head thrown back, arms spread, legs loose, and hurled herself without hesitation, backwards through the window, and into the dark.

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The problem with small towns is they only have one good club ~ Lauren catches up on missed destruction ~ choreo is once-learnt never-forgotten

Ally, who had done the dirty work of staking out right after the show, came home first. Dinah and Normani were probably still dealing with the police, because the Harmonies tried very hard-- _harder than a lot of people,_ Lauren would tell her mom sometimes--to work in partnership with local law enforcement. Even if local law enforcement were dicks to the low income neighborhoods that got caught between a rock and a hard place when one of their kids developed a mild case of levitation and then used it to levitate some goods right out of a Nike store.

Lauren was sitting in the little armchair eating more Cuban takeout. Superhero work may be morally complicated, but the food you grew up with was just a good thing whenever you could get it. 

“Yo,” Lauren called as Ally walked in, dropping a bag and a grimy performance outfit on the floor. She marched to the window and kicked through shards of glass with one thick black boot.

“Lauren, for real? Maverick is gonna kill us for unnecessary damages. Normani leveled a _cop_ _car_ tonight.”

“Woah,” Lauren said, impressed, “That’s usually my gig, I didn’t know she had it in her.”

Ally spun on her heavy boot heel and put her hands on her hips. “I’m not kidding Lo, why’d you do this?”

Lauren dug around the takeout for a stray maduros. “Falsely accused, _mi amor!_ As if! I’m practically on bedrest here. It’s a story, and I need all my ladies here to tell it.”

Dinah and Normani came back an hour later in high spirits. It was a good night: tracked down a few kids, intervened before they got tagged for life, scared some parents into confessing their role in it all. It happened more often than anybody wanted to admit, in these out of the way towns.

Normani curled herself around Lauren on the armchair, and Lauren budged up obligingly to let her.

“Babe,” Normani said, passion in her tone, “You should’ve seen these tiny little kids, broke my heart. Thirteen years old and maybe they could make a small rock float in the air, that’s all, but it fucking makes them a target.”

Lauren shook her hair in Normani’s face to make her crack a smile and swat it away. “I know, diva, I know. Hear you totaled a car though?”

Normani rolled her eyes. “Ally is being overdramatic.”

“Am not!” Ally yelled from the bathroom where she was working the roots of her hair through an overnight avocado oil mask. _Lauren’s_ overnight avocado oil mask.

“So I dented the engine a little bit,” Normani sniffed, and Lauren elbowed her. “Ok, a lotta bit. Had it coming. He was scaring the kids for no reason.”

“I believe you,” Lauren said. She kissed Normani on the top of the head and Normani squeezed her in return, carefully. Normani had been the one to find Lauren first after her powers manifested, back in the day, and that protective streak still lingered.

Powers were rare at all, maybe one or two kids at a really big school would have a little spark of something, and even then it was often hard to control, erratic. True superpowers--stable, controllable, powerful--were impossibly rare. It was a miracle that the Harmonies found each other when they did, that they’d all ended up in the same city, and Lauren didn’t like to imagine her life without them. Lauren didn’t even know who she’d _be_ without them.

“Lauren,” Dinah said, snapping her fingers. From the carpet, glass shards sparkled, rolled through the fibers, and rose willingly into the air like a miniature, suspended blizzard. They wheeled lazily in a giant figure eight, because Dinah was a showoff.

 “You gonna fill us in on why you destroyed our hotel room?”

“Oh my god,” Lauren said, “You guys, I found another one of _us.”_

 

*

 

The Harmonies were hitting the club at Dinah’s insistence, and because nobody else had any better ideas of how to spend another night after wrapping the second show. In the limo on the way over Ally had argued that they could stake out the same neighborhood in an attempt to figure out who it was who was influencing the kids, but Normani thought this was crazy and Lauren agreed.

“It was the parents,” she insisted, brow scrunched up in that way that the fans liked to call _fierce_ but that Lauren knew meant Normani was feeling more frustrated than anything else.

“Yeah,” Ally said doubtfully, “But it feels like there’s more to the story. Remember that fanmail about supers in this city? And the cops seemed extra nervous to run into us.”

Cops didn’t love superheroes, but since the federal rulings and the partnerships between superhero management and state governments, most municipalities acknowledged the critical role that the supers played in keeping the peace. Especially when it came to handling murky situations with the optimistically-named _specials,_ more colloquially referred to as _lifters, shifters and grifters._ Actual villains, like supers, were rare.

The Harmonies had a great reputation with the law, usually, but the same could not be said for every other powered vigilante group. In the early days groups like Backstreet had gotten particularly carried away, but things were better now, more organized. There was even another girl group rising in the UK, Lauren had heard rumors. A girl could dream.

“We _know_ there’s another super in this city,” Lauren pointed out, “Little miss window-crasher. That’s probably where the rumors came from, somebody seeing that Halsey chick throw herself under a train for fun.”

“Sounds like the two of you would get along,” Ally commented.

“ _Ally,_ ” Dinah said, hitting Ally’s arm with her clutch purse, “Too soon, smalls.”

Lauren stretched across the wide gap between seats in the expensive limo to plunk her stilettoed feet hard in Ally’s lap. Ally winced, but she patted Lauren’s feet anyway, and that was why Lauren loved her.

The girls coasted into the club backdoor and took over the VIP section. Lauren stretched her shoulders out under her skimpy black dress and surveyed the scene with some satisfaction. It was good to feel more mobile, and the DJ was actually not horrendous. It wasn’t LA, but she had her girls, she had her muscles back under control, and it would do for tonight.

Dinah got them all shots because _shots,_ and there was room on the dancefloor even for some of their more ridiculous choreo.

“Do the one from Paris,” Dinah laughed, “When the stage was like, half the size of what we’d rehearsed?”

“Oh my god that’s right,” Lauren said, “Normani and I had to double up!” She kicked into a ridiculous bend and snap, sidled up and put an arm around Normani, who was cracking up, and grabbed her arm to spin her around.

Normani shrieked, not a good shriek, but a bad, _let go_ shriek.

“Sorry,” Lauren gasped, pulling her hand back like she’d burned it. “Jesus, sorry.”

“It’s fine, babe,” Normani said, but Lauren could see the other girls exchanging glances, and Normani rubbed at her arm, which was starting to bruise. “It’s fine, just, be careful, it’s fine,”

 “I need a minute,” Lauren said, and pushed her way off the dancefloor.

The bathroom was empty except for someone in one of the two stalls. Lauren leaned over the sink and tried some deep breathing exercises. She stared into her own eyes in the mirror and tried not to hold onto the sink very tightly. _Fuck._ Behind her, a stall door opened.

“Harmonies!” High-pitched, raspier than the other night, but unmistakable.

“You’re the mother-flipping _Harmonies!”_ Halsey said happily, coming up to the sink next to Lauren and leaning on it like they were at the bar. “I knew you looked familiar but you know between the glass and the gun and the whole wrong room thing, just couldn’t place it.”

Lauren closed her eyes for just a second in a long, slow blink. “Played to fifteen thousand people tonight, but yeah, congrats on placing the face.”

“Asshole,” Halsey said, still sounding happy. Maybe she was a little buzzed, maybe she was just like this. “It’s cute how important you guys think you are.”

Lauren turned, and glared, because you know what? She was just not in the mood, not tonight and not this week and honestly, not for the whole last six months.

“Oh I get it now,” she said, “Why we thought there wasn’t anybody around to help this place. You’re just _above it,_ huh, above helping people.”

“So is _that_ your power?” Halsey wondered. “Do you read minds?”

Lauren dragged her fingers through her hair and tossed it back over her shoulders. It looked good, obviously.

“I don’t think that’s a real thing,” she said.

“Might be,” Halsey said, smiling with teeth. “Might be my thing.”

“If it were, you wouldn’t have that look on your face,” Lauren shot back. She was _pretty sure_ that telepathy wasn’t a thing, but in this world, who knew? Still, she was nothing if not good at standing her ground and bluffing.

Halsey tilted her head to the side and looked especially predatory. “Why, what are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you could do a lot more good in this world than you seem to be doing,” Lauren said. “That we spent last night trying to figure out who would help the specials, little kids in this town who could really use a role model, you know, or just someone to stop their idiot parents from letting them down.”  

Halsey shrugged. Lauren noticed that her eyes looked beautiful, but cold, like she wasn’t angry or even annoyed, just flat affect and casual sexiness.   

“Maybe I don’t care,” she said. 

Lauren glared. “That’s not how this works,” she said.

“That's not how this works,” Halsey repeated, mocking, but she also stepped closer, crowded Lauren up against the wall of the bathroom, which was surprising.

 Lauren felt the other girl’s body heat even through her leather jacket, uncomfortably physical. Maybe it was part of her powers, she thought nonsensically, but when Halsey cupped a hand around Lauren’s face and trailed her thumb against Lauren’s cheek, it was cold.

“Why don’t we just forget about your war for a minute, tourist,” Halsey said, right up against Lauren’s face. “I can think of more fun things to do.”

It should have been obnoxious, it _was_ obnoxious, but also Halsey was _so fucking hot,_ all hard cheekbones and huge eyes and lean muscles, the rings on her hand dragging against Lauren’s skin. Maybe it was the fact that it was a stupid night for doing stupid things in clubs. Maybe it was the giddy attraction of knowing that there was another female super here, and she seemed like she might be  _queer,_ and how in Lauren's experience, finding those three things together did not have good odds.

“You know my name,” Lauren said, as Halsey slipped her other hand around the small of her back and without any hesitation, slid just the tips of her fingers up underneath the hem of Lauren’s shirt. Lauren felt it like a shiver down her back.

“Why are you still talking?” Halsey said, closing her eyes and leaning in. Lauren waited to see if her brain could come up with anything better than the magnetic pull of Halsey’s face, but it didn’t.

 Halsey kissed just the way Lauren liked. She was gentle but unhesitating, and her cold mouth and tight jaw warmed up when Lauren got the right angle, put a hand behind her neck and pulled them both tighter against the wall. Halsey pressed up against Lauren with her entire body.

  _This doesn’t mean I like you as a person,_ Lauren thought, just in case Halsey really was telepathic.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wherein Lauren writes checks that Future Lauren will have to cash ~ more hotel rooms ~ the power of french fries

Lauren’s mom waited until seven AM to call, which was admirably self-controlled compared to six months ago.

“Did you see the papers?” she asked, rapidfire coffee-voice coming through the phone, second or third cup level. Lauren heard her mom’s voice at least three times a week but it still felt nice vibrating into her ear, even when she knew why the call was coming and how it was going to go. Normani rolled over on the mattress and put a small, gentle, insistent hand against Lauren’s hip and shoved her out from under the comforter and onto the floor.

“Lauren!” Mama exclaimed at the thump, “Is everything ok? Can you hear me?”

“You are grounded for eternity for not putting your phone on silent,” Normani said from underneath the covers. Lauren stuck out her tongue but it was wasted on somnolence.

“I’m fine, Mama,” Lauren said, kicking her way out the hotel door to the balcony. This hotel had a balcony, which was great, and last night Ally had catapulted all the way from the parking lot to their balcony in one go. It did feel a bit of a security risk, but then again, how fun would it be if someone tried to break in on the Harmonies? The balcony also made a good landing pad so that anyone breaking into their hotel room wouldn’t have to shatter their way through the window. Even if some people seemed to enjoy that.

“Did you _see the papers?”_ Mama asked again, insistently.

“Ugh,” Lauren said, “Mama, you know I told you to stop reading that junk.”

Mama huffed a breath into the phone, and Lauren smiled and plopped herself into the balcony chair. She tilted her head up towards the sky and closed her eyes. The sun was bright in this town, a little too bright for the morning, but it was summer. Everything felt a bit better in the summer.

“They were in our driveway,” Mama said, “Piles of papers. They put them in your sister’s locker. They even threw them in the garden.”

“What the _fuck!_ ” Lauren said.

“Language, Lauren,” Mama said quickly, of course, although Lauren couldn’t tell if she was being serious or mocking or some strange combination of the two, most likely. “They crushed half the Zinnias. They were coming in so good this year, too. I’m sending your Papa to the store for a whole new bag of mulch.”

Lauren cradled her chin in one hand and tapped the corner of the phone against her forehead with the other. “Mama,” she said slowly, “Did you tell the police?”

“It’s just _papers,_ ” Mama said, “Don’t try and distract me. I read the stories. Did you see what they’re saying about the children you girls have been helping? Did you see the thing about the cop car? What are you girls even doing out there? When are you gonna come home _,_ Lauren?”

She always asked too many questions to answer, threw them through the phone as long as she had breath. Like if she could only pile enough of them up together, Lauren would actually have the answers this time.

“I told you to stop reading those stories,” Lauren said, instead. “Is Taylor ok? Did you tell the police that people are giving you a hard time again? Did you see who was dumping the papers?”

“I just don’t know why you feel like you have to overdo everything,” Mama said, “You know I’m proud of you. But I don’t know why you have to go up against cops again, you know? Don’t hurt their cars, Lauren, they’re very into their cars, you know? You can’t go hitting people’s cars just because they don’t agree with you.”

“Mama _,”_ Lauren said, uselessly.

“When are you coming home? Why are you still punishing yourself, Lauren? You know you can come home whenever you want, don’t you?”

Across the parking lot, a couple of pigeons had found the bag of french fries that Dinah dropped in the gravel early that morning. French fries were the ultimate balm for dealing with parents. Lauren wished she were a pigeon, for a second, but it couldn’t really be a good life, waiting around parking lots for clumsy, tired superheroes to lose their fast food. Dinah had been so mad after the PSA meeting last night that she’d all but thrown the bag, all that talking about _special power ed classes_ and _protecting your kids_ and _community partnerships_ and still they just had to watch those parents turn into glassy, I-don’t-have-the-energy-to-care statues.

“I know,” Lauren said. “Look, it’s early, I need to sleep some more, we got a show tonight. Stop reading the papers. Make sure Taylor’s ok, really ok, not just how she says she’s ok but she’s really not. Tell her I’ll call her later.”

“I sent her to the store to help get the mulch,” Lauren’s mother said imperiously, “Your father would only get the wrong kind if I let him go alone. They’ll get ice cream after, it’s so hot today.”  

“Al’s Twist and Shake?” Lauren asked.

“Twist and Shake,” Mama confirmed. “Only the best.”

“Ok,” Lauren said, “I’m going back to bed, Mama, don’t read the papers.”

“I love you, be safe.” Like Lauren was the one who needed to worry about being safe.

 

Normani turned back around and spooned against Lauren’s back when she got into bed, squishing her face into Lauren’s shoulder blades.  

“If this is your half-assed apology for making my mom mad at me,” Lauren said into her pillow, “it’s working.”

“How is shit with your mom ever my fault?” Normani mumbled.

“Who’s gonna apologize for waking _me_ up?” said Dinah from the other bed. Still mad, then, Lauren noted: probably a good day for them all to hit the gym.

Lauren rolled over onto her back, looped an arm under Normani’s shoulders for a good cuddle, and stared up at the ceiling.

“Some asshole took a picture of the cop car the other night, so don’t look at the tabloids today,” Lauren said. Normani didn’t say anything, but Lauren thought she felt a sigh.

From the side table, her phone beeped, a follow-up text from Mama with a series of follow-up questions. Mama had learned too many techniques from the reporters who used to barrage the Harmonies in the early days, back when all the questions were about crushes and hairstyles and not civilian-super relations. A patented trick was that if you suddenly remembered a follow-up question after the first go-round, your target might have let their guard down preemptively.

“Probably some asshole cop,” Dinah said.

“Probably,” Lauren agreed, carefully lifting the phone off the table with her left hand and angling it away from Normani’s face. It was a text from Halsey, or as she’d named herself in Lauren’s phone in the club bathroom stall, _Real Bad Influence._

_ the q, where are you going tonight? the a, at a party with me _

Telepathy,  Lauren thought, Halsey phrasing it like that, but telepathy didn’t exist. Hopefully. Her phone beeped again.

_ even bigtime sheroes need to take breaks L _

Lauren rolled her eyes, but her thumb was already swiping. 

_ >We’ve got a show tonight.  _

_ blow it off _

__ >Some of us have jobs _ _

_ fine, after the show. don’t say no. i know you have enough outfits _

Lauren hesitated.

__ >Where, then? _ _

_ classified. meet you after your fancy show. full service. ;)  _

 

Lauren clicked off the screen and dropped her phone onto the carpet. Whatever dumb shit she was signing up for could be a problem for future Lauren. Against her side, Normani snored.

 “Hey Dinah?” Lauren ventured. Dinah made an _mmmph_ noise with enough of a rising pitch to signal wakefulness.

“Do you think that we’re making a difference? Out here on this tour?”

There was a beat of silence in the hotel room, and Lauren looked back up at the ceiling and traced the white paint texturing that spun swirling circles out from the center of the room.

“Five kids in this town met supers before they met villains,” Dinah said. “And they didn’t go to jail for something dumb. That matters.”

“Yeah,” Lauren said, “Yeah. Go back to sleep. I’m gonna make you hit the gym today.”

Dinah sighed, loudly, and Lauren smiled at the ceiling.

“Hey Lauren,” Dinah said, “hey, you know you don’t have anything to make up for, right? You don’t have to fix the world.”

“Thanks Dinah,” Lauren said, “Or should I say, Mom. 

One of the useless hotel bolster pillows -- long, fluffy, and maliciously scratchy gold tassels hanging off the ends -- rose smoothly into the air, floated to Lauren’s bed, and whacked her in the face.


End file.
